communicate :: collaborate :: commemorate

It's kind of weird writing a first impressions for a product that is already more than a year old. But as it so happens, I just started using one today. I am a Mac user but I have a good background in using Windows, all the way back to the very first version. In fact, I have more PCs running Windows than I have Macs. The machine I have used the most during the last 18 months has been a Surface 3 with 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. It’s still working fine, but I wanted a better keyboard. And I got way more than I thought I would. Surface 3 runs on a mobile CPU which was mostly fine for me. So I was looking at using the same configuration with Surface Pro 4. But then the opportunity for a much faster machine arose.

So here we are: Surface Pro 4 with Intel Core i7-6650U running at 2.2 GHz with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. I never had issues with not enough RAM or not enough storage. My workloads are simple and I don't keep much data on the device. It’s always somewhere else in the background, in my own storage or in cloud storage. I travel light. That means I would have been fine with 128 GB of storage as well, but 256 is the minimum for i7 machines. Think of it as a two-seater sports car. And a sports car it is. Man, this thing is fast.

The thing I was worried about is fan noise. If you have a big engine, you need big cooling. Surface 3 has a tiny engine and no fans, so does the entry level Surface Pro 4 with an Intel m3 CPU. But now I am glad that I have the fast engine, because the fans only turned on during the initial load when Surface was installing updates, pulling down files from cloud storage and similar background tasks. I have not heard it since. And when it was on, it was rather quiet.

Three things happened today:

I was blown away by the keyboard. It's no compromise. This is the real deal, especially compared to Surface 3, but also compared to many other keyboard I use. It’s completely transparent to me. I don’t notice it at all. I just type without thinking about it. And that experience includes the trackpad on the keyboard. It feels natural to me as a Mac user, unlike the Surface 3 trackpad, which is barely usable at all.

When I set up the machine, it activated Windows Hello. That means it asks you to look at the camera and then it remembers your face through the infrared camera that sits left of the real camera. It also asks you for a backup PIN so you have another means to unlock the machine, if Hello fails. And that never happened. Surface recognizes me immediately, even before I sit down in front of it. This trumps a fingerprint reader by a margin.

The pen I used with Surface 3 was my favorite after Apple Pencil. The pen that comes with Surface Pro 4 however plays on a whole new level. There are no buttons at your fingertips, which were always kind of tricky to hit. It does have a button at the top for launching OneNote, taking a screenshot or calling Cortana. And it also works as an eraser, like you would with a pencil eraser. It has a flat side, there is a strong magnet and you can attach it to the left side of Surface, or the top, depending on how you hold it.

Better pen, much better keyboard and trackpad, very useful Windows Hello. And having that faster CPU has already made a big difference. I can finally use Flipboard on Windows which was way too slow on Surface 3.